The time has come to outline one of my deeply hold beliefs related to how people should do business, and these ideas would even extend to how people should approach personal relationships.

This whole discussion will be centered around a single word: trust.

And I will try to outline exactly why I believe trust is the most powerful leverage in any environment, especially a business one.

Trusting the sellers

When we are looking to buy something, we need to be certain of two things: the things that the person selling us something tells us the truth, and that the value we are getting from that product or service is on par with what we are about to pay for it. Which to some degree, also boils down to trusting the seller.

That’s why, people are repulsed by a lot of the scummy sales tactics that are out there, such as FOMO, false urgency or fake offers. While these scummy selling tactics are things that are proven to give some better results in the short term, a business that prioritizes short term over long term and trust building are not the partners you seek.

How can startups leverage this: be people first and have a friendly face talking directly to the customers. The best way to build trust with customers is to have real human customer support. I think I have heard a lot of times various people who wanted to start a startup getting discouraged that other big corporations already have a similar product or being scared that these corporations could decide one day to copy their product and kill them.

But the truth is that they won’t, because each product comes with some customer support overhead, which we all know they are cost cutting hard at that chapter. Which makes startups more attractive.

Trusting the employees

Any business, as it grows, will look to hire more and more people to fill in various roles.

When you are looking to hire, most companies look at two things: “technical expertise”, meaning if they have the skills to do what they are supposed to do, and the companies who really know what they are doing, also look for “cultural fit”, meaning getting the answer to “Can I and my teammates trust this person?”

Maybe you don’t agree with how I interpreted the 2nd one, but that’s how I see it: when you are part of a collective, trust is the most fundamental thing that keeps people together.

And a person who is deemed trustworthy in the eyes of their colleagues will:

• be reliable, meaning they do what they say and don’t look to “backstab”
• have compatible personal values, meaning deeper discussions and deeper connections will be possible between teammates, at a personal level
• puts the team first before themselves, meaning that they will look to mentor and bring others up, and share the successes at the team level
• psychological safety is nurtured and increased, resulting in employees trusting to speak up when things are bad more often. Even if it means that they vent, overall it will improve the team morale, because them, being in the first lines, see firsthand the recurring problems that can be tackled early.

Trusting the business partners

When you have a startup/business, your professional network is a game changer. And that is built on trust.

I recently came to realize the important of a strong professional network when you are just starting: when you know people and trust them, and they trust you back, you can ask for advice and ask them to refer relevant people for your problems which greatly amplify and speed up certain processes compared to doing them from scratch.

Let’s just take an example with looking for a new employee to fill a certain position.

In the traditional method, you would create a job post, post it and promote it on various platforms, get CVs, schedule interviews, spend a lot of time doing these interviews because you find out people tend to overstate their CVs or blatantly lie.

Overall, a long, painful, time consuming process, that need allocated resources for the whole time. Resources that can’t be used for the core business.

In contrast, when you have a network, you can ask people from your network for recommendation: “Hey X, you were a technical manager for a few years and worked with a bunch of programmers on the technology I am using. Do you happen to know somebody who do you think will be a good fit for us?”

It’s not guaranteed you will get results 100% of the time, but in the cases you get, you greatly reduce the effort, time and get a better quality employee (because if they get recommended, they are being trusted by the person who did the recommendation that they are a good fit, since they now tied their name to their recommendation).

But these networks are again, built slowly, over longer periods of time, and they require a lot of trust building.

The big “don’t”s that just destroy trust

There is a saying that “trust is difficult to build and easy to lose” and it seems that a lot of people ignore that. They think that if they did a bad things just one time, it is not a big deal, but it is. People who have their trust broken remember these.

Here are some things that deteriorate trust:

• saying you get back at somebody until a certain date, and you don’t. Even if you didn’t manage to gather the necessary information, you should just get back to them and tell them you need more time, and commit to a new deadline.
• getting into a meeting late
• saying you don’t need help, after spending days or even weeks being stuck
• giving “harsh feedback” just because “I like to be direct”. Directness isn’t synonym with being an asshole. Bad feedback can be delivered in a more humane way rather than saying “you suck”
• giving feedback that is not actionable, and that feels like a personal attack just for the sake of it. I am talking about things like “your code is not good enough”. Instead, you should say “Here are some things that I think will improve your code”.
• Breaking the trust of your employer in remote working environments. This is a tricky one, because the employee-employer trust has been corroding for a long time. On one side, employers tend to be more micro-managing and fail to listen properly to employees, which erodes trust, and on the other side, some employees “quit quit” or brag about being “over hired”, which greatly erode trust.

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